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Dermid McCulloch
So good, so good, so good.
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Dermid McCulloch
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Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. In this episode we return for part two of our recent live event with Dermid McCulloch, emeritus professor of the history of the Church at Oxford University. McCullough joined us recently at Union Chapel to discuss Christianity, sex and gender across history. He was in conversation with classicist broadcaster and author Mary Bird. If you haven't heard part one, do jump back an episode to catch up. For now, let's return to the conversation live at Union Chapel in London.
Mary Bird
I'm going to now ask a simple question which I fear doesn't have a simple answer, which is okay. Our stereotype of early Christianity is very much in terms of no sex. We're Christians and we see that loosely tied to figures, say, of the Virgin Mary under the fact that Jesus in the Gospels is not married, so far as we know. Do those figures, do they help launch that sense of the high achievers in Christianity should not be indulging in the life of the flesh.
Dermid McCulloch
It certainly helps that Jesus is unmarried, but then there are lots of Jewish prophets in his period who were unmarried. That is a Jewish thing, undoubtedly. There's also a group which is much argued about, called the Essenes. They're a Jewish group. They do not appear in the New Testament, though they were around at the time. That's quite interesting. So Jesus is, as far as we know, a celibate. There are silly modern stories about Mary Magdalene being his wife. Do not listen to them. They have no historical purchase at all. But his disciples, some of whom we don't know the names of, who may be women. Of course we have the names of 12 disciples or apostles. But the important thing about them is not their discipleness or their apostolicity, it is their twelveness. These people are 12 because they are the new 12 tribes of Israel. So don't mix up the 12 apostles with the apostolic ministry of the Church, which other people are called apostles too. And of those 12 apostles, at least one is married. Peter, we know he's married because he has a mother in law. She's mentioned in the New Testament. So they're not all celibate. So my complicated answer to your perfectly simple question, therefore.
Mary Bird
Yeah, yeah. And the big silence that we've had from Jesus is on homosexuality. For us, it's the big silence. But it does quickly appear to become the case in the history of the Church that homosexuality is thought of as bad.
Dermid McCulloch
Yep, it certainly does.
Mary Bird
Given that Jesus says nothing about it. How does that happen and how early does that happen?
Dermid McCulloch
Well, it happened. The hostility is there in Judaism in the two centuries before Jesus. And it's come in because their culture has come into a radical clash with the culture of the Greek world in which there is a place for a sort of set of same sex relationships. Very stereotyped, very precise. They are unequal. They're between younger and older. They're part of a life cycle in which both partners are expected to marry and have children at one stage. But it's a really important institution. Again, I'm teaching grandmothers suck eggs here that in certain circumstances this is a teaching relationship between an older man and a younger man. It's very male. And the Jews took against this. It's one of the things they didn't like in Greek culture. And you can see Jewish writers before the time of Jesus, in the time of Jesus, expressing his hostility. One of them became a big Christian name, Paul. And on one occasion he went off on it on same sex relationships when talking about something else. It's the beginning of what's now called the Epistle of the Romans. And he's got a big riff at the beginning of that epistle on idolatry, which he hates, rightly so. I think idolatry is a bad thing. But as an illustration, he says, well, all these people who become idolaters do all sorts of other terrible things. People of the same sex have the same sexual relations with each other. It's an illustration of idolatry. And then there are later epistles in the New Testament, some of which are not by Paul, but pretend to be, in which there are lists of bad people, liars, for instance. And among that list are People who are given two peculiar Greek words, arsenakoetai and malakoi. We're not quite certain what this means, but they are probably the two partners in this Greek institution.
Mary Bird
Malakoi means softest softies.
Dermid McCulloch
Yeah, but softies, both of them sound like Greek slang. There's no real history attached to them. Interestingly, in modern Bibles, particularly in the 1940s and 50s, these two words were translated by a single English word, homosexuals. Now isn't that dishonest when you don't really know what they mean but you think vaguely it's same sex stuff. So you use a word invented in 1869 to describe something in the first century of the Common era. Now that seems to me intellectually dishonest. And modern biblical translations don't do that.
Mary Bird
So part of your problem, we're going to come to this later, but part of the problem about looking for biblical help in thinking about the Church's current issues about homosexuality, gay marriage, et cetera, is that you're about talking, trying to impose a modern category on a complicated and difficult and different set of modern category.
Dermid McCulloch
Absolutely right. You can't say that what they're talking about is what a modern same sex relationship is likely to be any more than a heterosexual relationship. It's the ideal, we in our west at least, and lots of other people too, like is of two equal partners being together for as long as possible, perhaps for life. That's the homosexual image as much as it is the modern heterosexual image. And how do you fit that on this set of ancient texts? Doesn't work at all. Yeah.
Mary Bird
That said, it looks to me as if, let's say for the first millennium of Christianity, your hard put it to find support for homosexuality.
Dermid McCulloch
Absolutely. Again, you're being polite. There is an extraordinary degree of negativity which absolutely crystallized in the Western world in particular in the 12th century. All sorts of things happen. We talk all night about what happened in the 12th century. One of the big things is an intense hatred of same sex relations which they called sodomy. There were lots of other things called sodomy. The big one is same sex relationships and the big one inside that is male same sex relationships. Let me tell you a story which I think you may have read in the book. And this is a story made up by some western cleric around 1200. We don't know his name, but it's a story which became very, very widespread throughout the Western church, the Catholic Church that is. And it is the story of the great sodomite massacre of Christmas Eve. Now, let me tell you this story. Christmas Eve came on the first Christmas Eve. This is when little baby Jesus was going into the manger in Bethlehem. But before he got there, while still in heaven, he said to God the Father, I'm not going. I'm not going. I'm not going. I'm not going down there. The world is a terrible place. It's full of unnaturalness. It's full of sodomites. I'm not going to go down there. I might save some of them. And God the Father said to him, well, I do see a point. I think I better massacre all the sodomites. And so duly so behold, it came. God the Father on the first Christmas Eve, massacred all the sodomites across the world. And so little baby Jesus said, oh, that's fine, great. I'll go down into the manger in Bethlehem and carry on his life. Now, isn't this an awful story? But why, why would you make the story up? It became extraordinarily popular. You get friars preaching on this story. You get lovely mystical nuns casually mentioning it while they're talking really about something else. Why did they make this story up? Well, one friar in his sermon in the 15th century Italy, let the cat out of the bag on this. He said, well, why is it that Jesus Christ said nothing about sodomy in the the Bible? Because they'd all been massacred. They'd all been massacred on Christmas Eve. That is why some medieval cleric made the story up. It is to cover the embarrassment, the embarrassment of Jesus saying nothing about homosexuality.
Mary Bird
In a minute. What I want to do is kind of to look at what happens next, because, I mean, so far the impression that you've given, I hope that this is right, is that many of our pressing concerns, the pressing debates that modern Churchill churches have, are not solved by looking back to, you know, you think, I know how we're going to solve this. We get to look back to the very earliest, the purest form of Christianity. It doesn't help very much because they don't talk about what we want to talk about. And when they do talk about it, it's different. So what I want to do now is in a way move forward to some of our debates. Not without having reminded you, however, that in about 15 minutes we are going to open this up so that if you are, if you haven't been thinking about the question you want to ask, do so now, because we'll have half an hour of question. But, you know, I feel sort of fairly Confident about my very crude summary up to about 12th or 13th century, particularly with the sodomite massacre of Christmas Eve. Totally unforgettable.
Dermid McCulloch
You don't get it in school. Nativity plays much these days.
Mary Bird
I want to play the sodomite. We've dispensed with, you know, with a kind of huge investment in weddings and all the things. Right, okay. Where we're now doing. We're doing the next thousand years in a few minutes before we come to the present. Where are there big ruptures and fault lines that happen? I mean, if we're wanting to tell the story of how Christian writers and thinkers and Christian congregations have discussed sex in all its manifestations, are there some big incidents that change things?
Dermid McCulloch
I will jump us, if I May to the 16th century.
Mary Bird
Fine, fine. We're not really interested in the 14th or 15th. No, no, no, no.
Dermid McCulloch
We'll get the after that sort of present day sort of thing. But the reformation of the 16th century in the Western church is really important. Martin Luther was at the heart of a revolution against the church authorities. And at the heart of his revolution was his conviction that clergy were no different to anybody else. And the Western church had made clergy utterly different. And it had made them different by forbidding them any sexual life at all, particularly marriage and children. Up to the 12th century, most clergy would be married with families. Then the church clamped down that. Luther, 300 years later, said, that is a dreadful cheat. It is a perversion of the church. And clergy must be able to marry and have families because they are just men like all other men. And so Luther took a wife and so did Protestant clergy. Let me use that technical word, Protestant. The Protestant clergy family became an absolute institution of the Protestant Reformation, perhaps the most important thing about it. And the Protestant clergy, children were part of that. The wife, they're part of a unit which was now actually the model of the Christian life. For 1500 years, it had been the monk or the nun, the celibate. Now it was the marriage. Think of that. That is a complete turnaround. And you can never say when you realize that that marriage has always been the same in Christianity. Can I jump us forward to the 19th century? Big next thing to watch in the church's history is the widespread proliferation of rubber plantations in Brazil in the 1850s and 60s. From then on, there was a reliable supply of industrial rubber in the Western world. And what are the things you do with rubber? Well, you make contraceptives out of them. And so for the first time in world history, there was A reliable mechanical device for preventing contraception. That is a huge theological event for Christianity. And then in the 20th century, another sort of contraception was worked out by the pill. So you can either do it by this preventative method, rubber, or you can do it by interfering with the act of conception. Now, the Christian church has had to cope with these new facts, which mean that most sexual acts, whether between people of the same sex or of the opposite sex at the present day, do not have the possibility of procreation with them. And yet the Church's theology is still on the assumption that sex is about procreation. Christian theologians have not yet dealt with the new reality. Some churches have accepted contraception, I have to say, with some pride. The Anglican Communion did so in 1930. And because the Anglicans had accepted contraception, of course, with all sorts of provisions around it, like marriage, because the Anglicans had accepted contraception, the Roman Catholics forbade it completely. 1932 pronouncements in the same year. So that is the extent of the problem within Christianity about these basic things. The other thing that's happening while the rubber plants, plantations are going, women. Women are from the early 19th century, able to do all sorts of things that they were not able to do before. Eventually they could go to university. Think of it, they could become doctors, lawyers. All these things we take for granted were only there by huge struggles, and they were not complete until the 20th century. And that is a basic, big fact about Christianity. Once its theology was done by men. Now its theology is being done in new ways by women. And that will alter it profoundly. And it is profoundly altering and it is causing men enormous difficulty. You can see the difficulties, the frail masculinity which pervades politics across the world today. Well, you don't need me to name the places everywhere you look. And it's not just the Christian world. It's in India, it's in the Muslim world. Whatever this is is a big cultural struggle in which we find ourselves entangled. We can't get away from it, but we need to understand it. Back to the book. The book is meant to give you the tools to see how things are changing, how they've changed, and to be less afraid of them. Knowledge generally makes you less afraid. You're frightened of what you. You don't know. You're frightened of the unknown. And what you and I do as historians is give people medicine against their fear, their illness, their mental illness of fear and ignorance. That's what justifies our salary and our pensions.
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We are looking for something, something you've discovered. Give me something to believe in and some of us will stop at nothing to get it ready.
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There's no going back. Our directive is clear. Hang on.
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Mary Bird
But there remain. I mean, in a sense, what you're saying is that. Christian thinking still has got enormous revolutions going on in the world in which it cites itself, which of course it's finding very hard to manage. The revolutions are so big that the tools of traditional mail written, it doesn't have to be conservative theology. It remains male written, whatever it is, those tools find it very hard to give the kind of answers that we are now looking for.
Dermid McCulloch
Yes, I have to remind myself when I hear the anger of conservative Christians that it is a huge revolution. I've had two thinking of my 74 years of life in order to get where I've got to now. And churches move far more slowly. They're like great ocean liners to do a turnaround on any big issue. You'd expect that. So one has to be patient and one has to listen. And also, I think, do your best to meet people who are angry. I often remind myself that there is no arguing with. With stupid, but there is arguing with the troubled, the worried, the people who feel that they have a lot to lose by changing their thinking.
Mary Bird
That's a very. That's a generous way, I think, of providing a framework within which to see the sometimes fruitless, sometimes quite productive debates that happen within the church. But I still think, I mean, I think now, you know, historians are quite good at thinking about the future. Just as good as thinking about the past, really. And I wonder if we're historians, if you were here in 500 years time looking at the way, let's say the Church of England is arguing and tying itself in knots sometimes. What in kind of the light of history, do you think you'll feel surprised by? What do you think? Will we one day be able to see this more constructively rather than, you know, Banging on about who's going to get married in what church by whom.
Dermid McCulloch
Well, we will. To the extent that the arguments which are now convulsing Christianity will be long over my 500 year hence self being surprised. Well, I would look back and be surprised by the vehemence, the bitterness of it. I look back, for instance, at events in my native Scotland in the 1840s when the church of Scotland split down the middle and an entire new Church of Scotland was founded alongside it. The Free Church of Scotland, who built a parish church next to the old parish church with a manse and a missionary society. They tore themselves apart to hold nation. And what did they do it about? The right of patronage to appoint the parish minister. They argued about. They split the church over patronage. And you think in 500 GC they. They split the church over homosexuality. Can you believe it? And of course they will be having stupid arguments about something completely different. I know badgers or, or something which we would think were ridiculous. But that's human life. We are all flawed beings. And you and I do our best to unravel the weirdness of the past and explain it to the present. That task is never over, is it? Be nice if it was. It'd be lovely to live in a great rational society.
Mary Bird
We've got it all sorted now we can sit back.
Dermid McCulloch
That terrible book by Fukuyama who said
Mary Bird
the end of history, that was a bad prediction.
Dermid McCulloch
If ever there wasn't, that wasn't it anyway. So we have to realize that we're human beings, but we can solve problems. And that's honestly, I have to have faith in that. We can solve problems and we can see problems put in context and that's a hopeful.
Mary Bird
And we might be better than St. Paul at doing it.
Dermid McCulloch
Could be.
Mary Bird
Just throw that out as a possibility. I've got one last question for you before we throw the discussion open. You say very nicely in the book that it's the job of historians to unsettle settled fact.
Dermid McCulloch
Oh yes, right.
Mary Bird
That's absolutely right. That's what historians do. They make you feel surprised, uncomfortable, challenged. Is that really what I think now? You know, you came to writing this book after years and years working on the church and so I can't imagine that there was much that you came across in doing this that you thought surprised you. Is there a surprise in the course of what working for this? Is there something that you thought, wow, I'd never kind of got that before. I'd never seen that.
Dermid McCulloch
Oh, well, I've told you, actually, it is the Great Sodomite Massacre of Christmases. I kid you not. I only came to this story quite late in my reading. That can't be right. And I started looking around at sermons and there it was. And then I came to the explanation, because I read this particular Franciscan friar's sermon, so that surprised me. I will also say that lots of things made me laugh. It's not all doom and gloom. Some of the things which Christian had done have just been downright funny. And some of the way in which they've coped with their situations have been absolutely hilarious. Can I just tell one last one?
Mary Bird
Yeah, go.
Dermid McCulloch
This is about the church in Ireland in the 10th and 11th century. They were having fierce rows about the nature of monasticism. They'd had a long, long history of monks and nuns, but new, much more strict monks and nuns were coming in from Rome. So there's a lovely story about the blessed saint Scotin of Tiscophin in County Kilkenny, who, to show his sanctity, he sort of. In the. The 6th century, actually, we don't know when, but a few hundred years before the 10th and 11th century, to show his sanctity, he would sleep with two maidens with pointed breasts every night. And the blessed St. Brendan, he who discovered America, the blessed St. Brendan took it upon himself to criticize these arrangements, which infuriated the maidens with pointed breasts. So they rushed into the monastic cell of St. Brendan, threw back the covers, jumped into bed with him. Oh, by the way, they were wearing burning coals in their robes, which is an allusion to the Book of Proverbs. So they chucked the burning coals aside, jumped into the bed with St. Brendan and promptly went to sleep until about an hour later they said to St. Brendan, just get up and have a cold shower. You're disturbing our sleep. And this is a story about celibacy and continence, but it's mad, isn't it? But you can see lots of monks and nuns having a good laugh at it in the. The 11th century.
Mary Bird
Well, thank you very much for the 11th century joke. We now have just under half an hour. We're going to put the lights up a bit and we have roving mics. And can we kind of make the audience a little bit more the.
Dermid McCulloch
Oh, we're less visible. We're less visible, but more visible to us. But yeah, you'll probably.
Mary Bird
But if you put your hands up the roving mics, even if I can't see you, the roving mics will. And we're Going to take a couple of questions for demott to answer in twos because it makes it flow better. Okay, so let's start with the first one.
Audience Member
Hello. Yes, I just wanted to take us right back to the beginning and ask about Mary, the mother of Jesus. I was wondering when she became a virgin and what was the effect of her becoming a virgin.
Dermid McCulloch
Thank you.
Mary Bird
Can we have one more to add to that so that can take them as a 2? There's somebody at the front. This is where we can't see who's got the mic there. Oh, it's cheers.
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It's also related to virginity. Where does that actually come from? And why is female virginity so prized for such a long time? And where does that concept come from?
Dermid McCulloch
Okay, so we've got two virgin birth, which is handy. So we didn't say much about Mary, so it's nice to do that. And virginity. Well, now, many sections of the church talk about Mary as perpetually virgin, ever virgin. They even some parts of the church talk about her not being conceived in sin. The Immaculate Conception. These are both comparatively late doctrines. By late, I mean, the idea of perpetual virginity is 2nd century. The immaculate concept deception is later still, and Roman Catholics argued about it until the 19th century. Both of these are trying to defend Jesus in his humanity against sin. And because Mary is his mother, she is involved in that process. Let me take you one step back and. And I'm afraid I'm going to say something which may distress some people, but I will say it, and that is that the stories of Mary in the New Testament, which are scanty, do make it clear two things about the birth of Jesus. One is it's in Bethlehem that could be contested. But the other is that he is not the son of Joseph. He is not the son of his mother's husband. Now, very early on, people outside the Christian world said, well, that means he was illegitimate, doesn't it? And actually, if you read the two nativity accounts, they are quite cautious about what they say, but they say he's born of the Holy Spirit on virgin. Well, that's one thing to say, but the word virgin is ambiguous. Does it mean virgin or does it mean young woman? And the Holy Spirit, what is that born of the Holy Spirit? Well, the Holy Spirit is a spirit of randomness, of being outside the rules. And that could be construed as illegitimate birth. Now, when I was a lady 60, 70 years ago, illegitimacy was a very shocking thing. And people could have their lives ruined simply by being illegitimate. I think we've grown up a bit since then, and it may be that we are the first generation who can look at this problem of Jesus dispassionately or more dispassionately. Now that of course affects Mary because the church doubled down on the virginity idea from the second century. It really only became a universal doctrine in the church in the 4th century, and that's parallel with all sorts of other things happening. So Mary's cult, which is fifth, sixth centuries later, is late. It's not there to start with. It has become hugely important to the church and within it there is a great truth that Christians believe that the savior of world God, God self, is also a human being in an aspect, a person of his life that's hugely important. And the person at the heart of that is his mother. And we have yet to hear enough from women about what that means to them, to other Christians. I hope that sort of answers those two questions a bit.
Mary Bird
Okay, I'm going to thank you so warmly for a great conversation, eye opening conversation and you know, I'll go back and read Augustine a bit more carefully, I think. And I'd like to thank the audience for all your questions. They've been really super and I feel I have to apologize to those people who didn't get their questions in. That's really all from us. I'm going to abandon Dermot and go back to Cambridge. Good night and thank you for coming.
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts for ad free episodes and full length recordings. You can become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and if you'd like to join us at future events, you can find our full events program over@intelligencesquared.com attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
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Date: March 18, 2026
Guests: Diarmaid MacCulloch (Emeritus Professor of Church History, Oxford), Mary Beard (Classicist, Author, Broadcaster)
Host (Producer): Mia Sorrenti
Location: Union Chapel, London
In this rich and engaging live event, historian Diarmaid MacCulloch and classicist Mary Beard explore the shifting landscape of sex, gender, and sexuality within Christian tradition, examining 3,000 years of history. Part two of their conversation delves deeply into pivotal moments, doctrinal developments, and the tension between ancient texts and modern debates—highlighting misunderstandings, anxieties, and stories that have shaped Christian attitudes to sex and gender from the early Church to today.
Timestamps: 01:32–04:01
Timestamps: 04:01–07:28
Timestamps: 07:28–08:26
Timestamps: 08:26–13:05
Timestamps: 13:05–20:18
Timestamps: 23:24–25:13
Timestamps: 25:13–28:36
Timestamps: 32:51–37:15 Questions:
MacCulloch’s Answers:
The conversation paints a vivid history of how Christian teachings on sex, gender, and sexuality have shifted in response to theological, cultural, and technological change. Both speakers emphasize the risks of projecting modern concepts onto ancient texts and urge for historical understanding as a remedy for fear and prejudice. With memorable stories and generous, often humorous, insight, MacCulloch and Beard remind listeners that debates once viewed as seismic often later seem parochial, and that religious traditions are always more dynamic and complicated than they appear.
For further reflections or to join in the debate, follow Intelligence Squared’s upcoming events or listen to Part One of this conversation for broader context.